1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to identifying website users and, more specifically, to consistently assigning a website user with a user identification (ID) utilizing web cookies.
2. Introduction
Websites often assign user IDs to visitors and typically store each visitor's user ID in a persistent cookie in the visitor's browser. This user ID may be used in numerous ways to enhance the user's experience on the site, for example, to personalize the presentation of content or to enhance the web publisher's tracking and reporting capabilities. All persistent cookies expire, and if a user ID cookie expires mid-session, while the visitor is actively engaging with the site, that user may experience confusing or unattractive content. For example, while conducting a test of different page layouts, certain users may have been randomly selected to view a particular page layout. The specific layout ID may be stored in a cookie for each particular user. When rendering a web page, the cookie may be used to indicate the layout that should be shown to this user. If the cookie were to expire either between visits or during a visit, the user might be assigned to view another layout, resulting in a potentially confusing “flip” from one layout to another.
Content publishers have attempted to remedy such situations with existing technology, for example, by continually re-setting the cookie with a new expiration date on every response from the web server. However, the continual re-setting of cookies introduces certain inefficiencies and overhead into the website operation, such as the addition of unnecessary web traffic in each of the site's responses to user requests. Another solution involves setting the cookie's expiration date to a distant future date, for instance, ten years from the current date. These methods do not provide a satisfactory solution in all cases. As such, there may be a need for improved methods of persisting cookies, for example, in support of providing consistent user experiences.